The first critical text of the widely and enormously influential Meditaciones vite Christi responds to a declared desideratum of scholars in a large number of disciplines dealing with devotional and mystical literature of the Middle Ages. A medieval 'bestseller' at one time attributed to Saint Bonaventure, this text at last sheds its neo-Latin overlay and sets in charming outline a synthesis of the new Franciscan movement.
After examining over 100 manuscripts, Stallings-Taney has identified 4 manuscripts which contain a text unaltered by neo-Latin standards. She has collated these 4 as well as 7 fourteenth and fifteenth century manuscripts (edited as early as the fourteenth century according to neo-Latin standards) against the Vatican 1596 recension. The consensus of the early 4 manuscripts sets in place the original Italianized Latin of John of Caulibus, a humble Tuscan Franciscan, who had no other goal than the spiritual direction of an unknown Poor Clare nun. The consensus of the later manuscripts, recorded in the critical apparatus, preserves the neo-Latin text known to such translators as J. Meadows Cowper and Nicholas Love. Additionally, Stallings-Taney has re-established several lengthy passages once a part of the original text, but dropped in some of the printed recensions.
Of special interest to liturgists is the extensive Index locorum liturgiae as well as the Index locorum S. Scripturae. An Instrumenta Lexicologica Latina fascicle will also be available very soon.